Let’s go, already!
How you can help: If you run a website and can filter traffic by user agent, get a list of the known AI scrapers agent strings and selectively redirect their requests to pre-generated AI slop. Regular visitors will see the content and the LLM scraper bots will scrape their own slop and, hopefully, train on it.
This would ideally become standardized among web servers with an option to easily block various automated aggregators.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on - social media, public image storage, copyrighted media, etc. All those sites with extensive privacy policies who are signing contracts to permit their content for training.
Without laws (and I’m not sure I support anything in this regard yet), I do not see AI progress slowing. Clearly inbreeding AI models has a similar effect as in nature. Fortunately there is enough original digital content out there that this does not need to happen.
Regardless, all of us combined are a grain of rice compared to the real meat and potatoes AI trains on
Absolutely. It’s more a matter of principle for me. Kind of like the digital equivalent of leaving fake Amazon packages full of dog poo out front to make porch pirates have a bad day.
They’ll just start using a chrome user agent
Only if enough people do it. Then again, loads scrapers outside of AI already pretend to be normal browsers.
AI already long ago stopped being trained on any old random stuff that came along off the web. Training data is carefully curated and processed these days. Much of it is synthetic, in fact.
These breathless articles about model collapse dooming AI are like discovering that the sun sets at night and declaring solar power to be doomed. The people working on this stuff know about it already and long ago worked around it.
Both can be true.
Preserved and curated datasets to train AI on, gathered before AI was mainstream. This has the disadvantage of being stuck in time, so-to-speak.
New datasets that will inevitably contain AI generated content, even with careful curation. So to take the other commenter’s analogy, it’s a shit sandwich that has some real ingredients, and doodoo smeared throughout.
They’re not both true, though. It’s actually perfectly fine for a new dataset to contain AI generated content. Especially when it’s mixed in with non-AI-generated content. It can even be better in some circumstances, that’s what “synthetic data” is all about.
The various experiments demonstrating model collapse have to go out of their way to make it happen, by deliberately recycling model outputs over and over without using any of the methods that real-world AI trainers use to ensure that it doesn’t happen. As I said, real-world AI trainers are actually quite knowledgeable about this stuff, model collapse isn’t some surprising new development that they’re helpless in the face of. It’s just another factor to include in the criteria for curating training data sets. It’s already a “solved” problem.
The reason these articles keep coming around is that there are a lot of people that don’t want it to be a solved problem, and love clicking on headlines that say it isn’t. I guess if it makes them feel better they can go ahead and keep doing that, but supposedly this is a technology community and I would expect there to be some interest in the underlying truth of the matter.
More like… Degenerative AI *ba dum tsss
Model collapse is just a euphemism for “we ran out of stuff to steal”
It’s more ''we are so focused on stealing and eating content, we’re accidently eating the content we or other AI made, which is basically like incest for AI, and they’re all inbred to the point they don’t even know people have more than two thumb shaped fingers anymore."
It is their own fault for poisoning the internet with their slop.
In case anyone doesn’t get what’s happening, imagine feeding an animal nothing but its own shit.
Photocopy of a photocopy is my go-to metaphor for model collapse.
This sounds like AI is literally biting its own tail
ChatGPT, what is an ouroboros?
Good.
is it not relatively trivial to pre-vet content before they train it? at least with aigen text it should be.
The problem is these AI companies currently exist on the business model of not paying for information, and that generally includes not wanting to pay content curators.
Google is probably the only one in a position to potentially outsource by making everyone solve a “does this hand look normal to you” CAPTCHA
They can try and train AI to detect AI, but that’s also difficult.
So it’s not a problem with AI. It’s just a problem for some mayfly companies that try to profit from the latest trend?
As always.
The model isn’t dying, its the way these parasites want it to work that is dying.
oh no are we gonna have to appreciate the art of human beings? ew. what if they want compensation‽
remember how nfts feel off (due to how they lost their value) have a theory that ais will come to the same fate cause they cannot train (it according to the article?)
Cool, let’s try to ruin it faster!
I’ve been assuming this was going to happen since it’s been haphazardly implemented across the web. Are people just now realizing it?
People are just now acknowledging it. Execs tend to have a disdain for the minutiae. They’re like kids that only want to do the exciting bits. As a result things get fucked because they don’t really understand what they’re doing. As Muskrat would say “move fast and break things.” It’s a terrible mindset.
“Move Fast and Break Things” is Zuckerberg/Facebook motto, not Musk, just to note.
Oh, I stand corrected
It is very much the motto this idiot lives by. He just wasn’t the first to coin that phrase.
Looks like that artist drawing self portraits as his alzheimer got worse and worse.
It’s basically AI alzheimers
AIzheimers?
Ah, the Hapsburg of AI!
Oh, the artificial humanity!
Are you confusing the Habsburg Dynasty with the Hindenburg?
Perhapsburg they are
No, I just thought they were vaguely similar enough words to make a dumb internet joke.
You’re right, that’s a good dumb internet joke. I’m just being needlessly pedantic today.
I see your needless pedantry and raise you abrasive grammarian.
Good
So AI:
- Scraped the entire internet without consent
- Trained on it
- Polluted it with AI generated rubbish
- Trained on that rubbish without consent
- Are now in need of lobotomy
